Facets' Lew Ojeda on Lady Terminator and the golden age of Indonesian exploitation cinema

In the late '60s, newly ascended Indonesia president Suharto issued a mandate that would lead to countless numbers of gruesome deaths and horrors beyond what any had seen before, and also hot, steamy sex. In an effort to attract American money and boost nationalism, Suharto decreed that for every three American films that Indonesian film distributors import, they must produce one domestic film. The resulting explosion of cheaply produced films would spur a golden age of Indonesian exploitation cinema, as films with outrageous, often bewildering plots packed with wonderfully senseless sex, violence, and gore created bona fide stars and brought native mysticism to a new visual medium. (The Warrior action star Barry Prima says locals took to the films with such seriousness that they would touch him, believing he possessed magical powers.) With Indonesia's bizarre rip-off of The Terminator, Lady Terminator, screening at Facets on Saturday, The A.V. Club talked to the evening's lecturer, Facets Video Consultant Lew Ojeda, about five films from the golden era that dazzles with cheap special effects, ceaseless sex, and an inordinate amount of floating body parts.

Lady Terminator (Tagline: “She mates... Then she terminates”)

The A.V. Club: How is Lady Terminator different from the American Terminator, if at all? 

Lew Ojeda: Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, and sex. Absolutely, sex. Did I mention sex?  

AVC:  So every other scene is a bizarre, out-of-the-blue sex scene?  

LO: Well, I think this was genius by the filmmakers. They probably had to have known that they could never recreate the cyborg future of The Terminator and bring those characters from the future into the present. So what they did was make the source of evil The South Sea Queen, who had an insatiable sexual appetite. The beginnings of the evil is a curse placed on a Westerner who steals the man-killing snake that’s inside the vagina of the South Sea Queen.

AVC: So I saw that correctly, in the trailer there’s like split second where a snake is slithering right towards this woman’s vagina. 

LO: Yeah, in the beginning of Lady Terminator, one of the many men that the Queen Of The South Seas is going to fuck and kill reaches in and steals the snake, which turns into a dagger. And so her power of killing men is temporarily taken away from her until she places a curse on that man’s great granddaughter, who eventually becomes Lady Terminator, as she is kidnapped by the South Sea Queen and put into bondage. The snake impregnates her and she becomes the Lady Terminator, going out for killer sex. 

AVC: It’s a really weird synergy of these two stories, combining Indonesian folklore with this futuristic American film. 

LO: Yeah, it’s an interesting melding. It’s a rip-off, but it also stands alone. If you did not know of The Terminator, and you’re watching this for the first time, your mind would just be blown away. If you’re the type of person that’s seeking out sex and violence in movies, you’ve got it all in Lady Terminator.

The Devil’s Sword (Tagline: “Sex, savagery, and mystical martial arts, an astounding voyage into the unknown!”)

LO: The Devil’s Sword is another film that involves the Queen Of The South Seas. She orders a male servant to go and steal a groom that she wants from a wedding. So this evil warrior stops by a wedding celebration, causes massive destruction, just chopping heads and stabbing people everywhere, just causing a whole hell of a ruckus, and steals this groom for the Queen of the South Seas. She lives at the bottom of the ocean and has men sacrificed to her through drowning, and her servants are alligator men who will do her bidding. Barry Prima plays a warrior named Mandala who is sent to try and retrieve the Devil’s Sword before it’s picked up by the evil warrior and given to the South Sea Queen.

AVC: It sounds ridiculous. Is it supposed to be an Excalibur rip-off? 

LO: Yeah, there’re always these connections with Western mythologies and Western stories. With some of the evil villains in Indonesia, it’s said that if you cut off their heads as long as the limbs or severed head or other body parts has touched the ground, then the evil demon has the power to reassemble. So that displays prominently in one fight scene in The Devil’s Sword. An evil warrior is fighting a witch and severs her head, but then throws a boulder to keep that head from touching the ground. So it’s wedged in the rocks, and then another boulder comes up and keeps the head in place to keep it from reattaching.

Virgins From Hell (Tagline: “They have known every pleasure, except by the touch of a man's hand”)

LO: Two sisters watch their parents get killed and their plantation taken over by this criminal who uses that plantation as a source for scientific experiments. The criminal and his men kidnap a doctor and force him to produce a serum that acts as an aphrodisiac to women, so they can spread it all over the world and become powerful because they’ve got all these women writhing and wanting sex all the time. The two sisters start up a girl gang and steal money and weapons so that they can ambush the plantation and kill these guys. It starts up with a lot of action, a lot of ass kicking, a lot of gunfire by these women, until they are captured and it becomes like a women-in-prison movie. They’re tortured, all this other stuff until they are able to get some help from a young man who allows them to escape and rearm and fight again. There’s something I wanted to bring up with Virgins From Hell and Lady Terminator. Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation in the world, so women are kind of subservient. So this allows women to have some power, in a way.

AVC: So you’re saying Virgins From Hell had some social, feminist impact?
 
LO: Well, I’m not sure what the exact social impact was on this. But when you see women who were powerful enough to form a gang and fight with AK-47s while still maintaining their beauty, I can imagine that it had some sort of “girl power” impact. It isn’t 100 percent feminist—having a woman roasted over a barbeque pit is not the most feminist thing that you’re going to see. But that most of them become resilient and fight might be something of an inspiration to women.

Queen Of Black Magic (Tagline: “He seduced and destroyed her. Now, she would make them pay!”)

LO: Queen Of Black Magic starts off with a wedding that goes bad. The bride suddenly gets these horrific visions of things like snakes approaching the canopy of her wedding bed, and the guests looking like monsters. The people begin to realize that there is black magic going on and seek a young woman who was the former lover of the groom, who basically ditched her, and now, in a jealous rage, she wishes bad things for the bride and that’s why she’s having these visions. They seek her out, burn down her house, and throw her over a cliff. But before falling to her death, her fall is broken by an old wizard who teaches her black magic. So, one by one, she hunts down the people who tossed her over the cliff. And luckily we have special effects expert El Badrun causing very bloody, very violent deaths for these people. Like a guy who is forced to decapitate himself with his own hands by lifting his own head off his body. And other lovely things like that. 

AVC: This sounds like the witchcraft trials, except when the mob tries to kill the person, she actually learns witchcraft. 

LO: Yeah, exactly! It’s kind of a slam at the justice system there, too. Here’s a woman who feels that she doesn’t have recourse; she can’t go to the police, she can’t go to authorities. The only thing she can do, just like in Death Wish, is to become the evil that she is accused of being in order to seek out the justice she rightly deserves.  

Dangerous Seductress (Tagline: “Sleep with her ... and you sleep forever”)

LO: A young woman is approached by her husband celebrating her anniversary. He comes home with flowers in his hand and a lot more on his mind. His wife wants to have a nice time on her anniversary—he celebrates their anniversary by basically anally raping her. Happy Anniversary! [Laughs.] So distraught, raped, and beaten, she calls up her sister who happens to be in Jakarta at the time, her sister is a model, and she calls her and says her husband is a pig and the sister says come stay with me. While she’s there, she accidentally runs into a book on black magic.

AVC: Is there always black magic in these movies? 

LO: Always. She conjures up the Queen Of Darkness. In an early scene, as she is starting to take a human form, her yet-developed skeletal leg is being chewed on by a dog, and she reaches down and decapitates the dog with her bare hands. [Laughs.] And you see a scene where the dog's head is rolling on the ground, and its torso spurts out blood, those sort of wild scenes. Anyway, the young blond woman calls up the Queen through incantation, and once again has an insatiable appetite for men and killing them after she has sex with them, and then taking in all their blood and then expelling the blood to the Queen of Darkness, via a magic mirror that the Queen appears in. So basically she’s like a go-between vampire.